Of all the genres of literature in the Bible, letters are in some senses the closest to a sermon. Like a sermon they are a ‘word on target,’ addressed to a particular place and time; and like a sermon, they use the tools of rhetoric to address an audience directly, in appeal, instruction, warning, or encouragement. Not all the letters in the New Testament are equally situational, or at least not all are evidently so to the same degree. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, to the Philippians, and to the Galatians, are clearly products of a specific time and place, with an immediate context and purpose. Others seem more general and non-specific. The letter to the Ephesians may have been a circular letter, while James, 1 Peter, and 1 John seem to have a broad audience in view. Hebrews – which is not really a letter, as neither the author nor the addressees are named – is more like a treatise with a homiletic intent, but when and where it was written, and to whom, remains a mystery. But even if these letters seem relatively generalised in time and place, they all parade the fact that they have an audience in view (unlike, for instance, the Gospels), with plenty of statements addressed to ‘you’. In that sense they should be easier than some texts to use for a sermon, which is also addressed to an audience. They also use rhetorical techniques, many of which will be familiar to the preacher.

Nonetheless, most preachers find the Epistles much harder material for sermons than the narratives of the Gospels and Acts. There are a number of reasons why that is so. Some of the contents in the Epistles (for example, Romans and Hebrews) feels abstract or conceptual, more like a theological treatise than a letter. That suits some preachers and some churches very well, but for others it is heavy going, and where congregations are not used to theological language it will require the preacher to translate the textual material into contemporary idioms. Sometimes, the material is dense: there are highly compressed sentences and paragraphs that need unpacking, and complex sequences of thought that are not easily grasped (for instance, 1 John and 1 Peter). Sometimes, the rhetoric that made these letters so vivid and effective when they were originally written is difficult for a modern audience to grasp, or off-putting to a modern ear: think of Galatians or 2 Corinthians. The Gospel narratives (at least the Synoptics) seem generally easier to enter, with more straightforward points of identification for believers today. Some congregations will relish the meaty theology of the Epistles; others will hear sermons only on the ‘purple passages’ like 1 Corinthians 13 or (parts of) 1 John 4.

The key point is this: the Epistles were written to bring central aspects of ‘the good news’ of Jesus Christ to bear on actual believers in real-life situations. The preachers’ task is to do the same. We may need to do some work to generate the same impact; our situations are not the same as those of the authors and original audiences. But these texts were included in the canon for a reason: through them people heard the good news and found points of resonance with their own lives. So the preachers’ task is this: to think our way sufficiently into the text as to discern what is most at stake, what aspect of the good news is here at play; and then (with the aid of the Spirit) to move sufficiently from the text into our contemporary situations as to make the text ‘fizz’ with the same gospel-energy that it had when it was first written. I suggest four strategies that might help in this task.

1. MAKE USE OF THE LETTER GENRE

If Epistles were written by real people to real addressees, they lend themselves – at least in some cases – to evoking the drama of a real-life context. Paul writes on the road, in prison, with friends, or without them: can we use well-informed historical imagination to recreate the situation, earthing the content in the realities of their original setting? That will take a bit of study and some familiarity with the first-century world, but Paul tells us enough about his life circumstances to make that possible, at least in general terms. He usually writes to named people: can we bring those audiences to life, and imagine them hearing and responding to these letters? A disciplined imagination is no bad thing: we can learn from Paula Gooder, who has done this well with Phoebe and Lydia.[¹] How did Euodia respond to Paul’s letter to the Philippians? What would the Corinthians make of Paul’s sometimes stinging rebukes? What did Onesimus think as he carried the letter to Philemon? These texts crackle with tension, emotion, and the awkwardness of conflict. Can we imagine our way into them in order to find a resonance today?

Some New Testament letters may themselves be the product of some such imagination. Most scholars, for instance, think that the three Pastoral Letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) were not written by Paul himself, but by a disciple of Paul in a subsequent generation, who was inspired to imagine what Paul would have written to church leaders of their time. Something similar might be happening with 1 and 2 Peter, and James. So the letters themselves begin a process of imagining what an apostle might say to a later time, extending, developing, and applying the apostolic ‘good news’ for new contexts. Following their example (but without the same claim to canonical authority), we can continue to let the apostles speak today. The preacher’s task is to let that speech sound vivid, lively, immediate, and contemporary. But at least we have some historical characters with which to work.

2. DON’T GET FIXATED ON THE PERSON OF THE AUTHOR

This may seem like a contradiction of the first point, but it is better taken as a partial corrective. By all means bring Paul or Peter or whoever to life, but don’t allow the sermon to get stuck there, as if what really matters is Paul (or whoever) and not what they say regarding the gospel. The fact that some letters might not have been authored by the person to whom they are attributed is again helpful here. They imagine an apostle writing this letter, not to tell us more about that apostle, but to help us hear in a fresh way what the gospel has to say to a new situation. The attribution of authorship is to make us sit up and listen: but what we are to listen for is not some new insight into the psychology of Paul (or Peter, or John) but some fresh angle on the truth of Jesus Christ. The author is the medium but not the message. As Paul says of his preaching, ‘when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you’ (1 Thessalonians 2:13). We may certainly use the drama of the Epistles to draw our hearers into the vividness and immediacy of the message. But our purpose in doing so is not that they get fascinated by Paul (or Phoebe, or whoever) but that they hear what the good news might be in the equally vivid and immediate moment today. For the same reason, we don’t need to be drawn into defending the character of the authors, finding reasons to excuse the rougher aspects of their rhetoric. Whatever the congregation might think of Paul (who had a mixed reputation then, as he has now), what matters is that they understand what it was in the gospel that drove his passion to write as he did.

3. PRESS INTO THE TEXT TO FIND THE GOOD NEWS AT STAKE

Even if Paul (for instance) seems overly concerned with himself, we should take him at his word: what matters is not what people think of him, positive or negative, but whether Christ is preached (Philippians 1:15-18). All the Epistles are to be taken as efforts to tease out what matters about the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the saving work that he has begun and will complete. Sometimes the logic of a particular passage may be hard to follow (commentaries may help); sometimes an individual cluster of verses may seem irrelevant or obscure (look for the larger context); sometimes the text seems so immersed in its first-century context and its hierarchical assumptions that it seems inapplicable today. You will not be the first to find the text difficult in this or other ways, but plenty of others have found a way into the clay jar and located the treasure within (2 Corinthians 4:7).

The question to ask is this: what is the real subject matter of this text? Where does it take us closer to Christ? Sometimes the answer is straightforward, right there on the surface of the text: most of 1 Peter, or the central chapters of Romans, are relatively clear in that respect (even if Romans 7 can take some work). Sometimes the connection to the gospel can be harder to trace, requiring us to pan back from the immediate text to the wider context, or to place what we read on a larger theological map. Sometimes the ethical instructions in the text need to be read very consciously through a gospel-filter. The ‘household codes’ of Colossians (3:18 – 4:1), Ephesians (5:21 – 6:9), and 1 Peter (2:13 – 3:7), are a case in point, with their instructions that slaves, children, and wives ‘submit’ to the male head of the household. It will take a very deliberate theological hermeneutic to apply those texts well, shaped by the gospel as we hear it elsewhere in the text and interpret it today. In fact, of course, no reading of the text is free of interpretation of some sort, however ‘literal’ it may claim to be. The challenge is to match in our own day what the Epistles themselves were designed to do in theirs – to bring the gospel alive in the minds, hearts, and emotions of the hearers, and to bring it to bear on their everyday lives. That may require saying something more than the Epistles on the basis of the Epistles, always seeking to remain true to the good news they were eager to communicate.

4. TAKING IT WHOLE OR IN PIECES?

In those churches that follow a lectionary, one of the New Testament readings is usually from the Gospels and the other (usually) from an Epistle. If the text from the Epistles looks difficult for any reason, the chances are that the preacher will give it a wide berth. But those of us in the pew (I speak as a lay person) need a balanced diet. With some exceptions, Epistles are not best read in snippets. Even episodes from the Gospels are best read in their larger context, but (because of their origin in the oral tradition) some can be interpreted reasonably well on their own. That is rarely the case for a section of an Epistle, which is why the best way to preach on an Epistle is probably to take it in stages and in sequence, week by week. By such means the congregation can get a sense of the heart of the message and can see each part of the letter in connection with its core. A passage taken out of context can seem random, obscure, or insignificant, less worthy of a sermon than a Gospel text.

But even in a lectionary-controlled context, the Epistle should not be routinely left to one side: even if we don’t get these theological vitamins every week of the year, we certainly need them sometimes. This is where the preacher has to do the work that the lectionary does not provide – to describe the situation, connect the text to the heart of that Epistle, and locate the good news it is seeking to convey. If it is over-weighty for the congregation, one can select a critical part; if it is overly complex, one can press through the complexity to its simpler heart. The preacher sets the mood: if you sound reluctant to preach on this text, the congregation will be reluctant to hear you. But the treasure is there, if you can find it, and it is well worth the effort of hammering away at these clay jars until you find a gem that your congregation will treasure through the following week and beyond.

[¹] Paula Gooder, Phoebe (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2019); Lydia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2023).